A couple years ago, Russell Banks was one of three judges who selected “Snow Falling in Cedars” as the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discovery Award. In a ceremony at a Manhattan B&N store, Banks gave a righteous speech in which he declared that the realism in that novel had redeemed American fiction. Banks never defined “realism,” assuming the crowd knew what he meant. Banks implied realism was holy. More than that, realism was American. This is an impressionistic description of that night, but Banks spoke with such fully vented spleen about fiction that didn’t toe his line that it was as if he wished the Ayatollah Khomeini had proclaimed a fatwa on Thomas Pynchon and his whole crew of American postmodernists.
Now, it’s several years later, and HarperFlamingo, HarperCollins’ new designer line of literary fiction, has published Banks’ opus of realism, “Cloudsplitter.” The novel is this author’s sincere attempt at the Great American Novel. Remember that term? These are the days when novels are micromanaged into genre — first novels, coming of age novels, sexual preference novels … and the most expansive genre, the category known simply as “literary fiction.” The idea that any novel could be so expansive as to be classified as the Great American Novel is a fairy tale. (Besides, we all know that term really meant the Great American White Male novel.)
But let’s say that Toni Morrison’s inspiring “Paradise” is indeed a Great American Novel. Then, based on ambition alone, “Cloudsplitter” also has a shot at the title. The novel is the tale of abolitionist guerilla John Brown, as told by Brown’s third son, Owen. John Brown, if you don’t know from history books (or the numerous reviews that jumped the March publication date in an attempt to have the definitive word on this book), was the fierce abolitionist who in 1859 led a raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., to capture the U.S. arsenal situated there, with the intention of then leading the insurrection that would liberate all the slaves in the South.
Before we go any further, also know that between that date and the present, Philadelphia-born critic James Gibbons Huneker (1860-1921) coined the term Great American Novel. In 1917 he wrote an essay claiming that the thing hadn’t been written yet, but when it was it would likely be a big historical narration à la Sir Walter Scott — the last author who accomplished what Huneker called “the big bow-wow strain” (whatever he meant by that!). The historical scope of Banks’ novel is awe inspiring and would certainly make a dog bark. After taking in Banks’ interpretation of pre-Civil War America, you might consider John Brown one of the seminal figures in U.S. history. Not because of what Brown did, per se, but because of how wrong he was in predicting American events: “Remember,” his son Owen reminds us, “all-out war between the North and the South was unthinkable to us: due to an ancient, deeply ingrained racism, any war undertaken by the citizens of the North for purpose of freeing an enslaved people whose skins were black seemed a pure impossibility. We believed instead that the Northerners — when it finally came clear to them what we already knew, that the South now wholly owned the government of the nation — would simply secede from the Union.”
Banks’ novel further explains that what Brown proposed to accomplish was the unification of the United States by keeping the North from seceding from a nation where an abolitionist senator could be clubbed nearly to death in the very chambers of the Senate. (Charles Summer of Massachusetts was viciously caned by South Carolinian Preston Brooks and never fully recovered, while Brooks returned home to a hero’s welcome.) Brown presumed that the uprising at Harpers Ferry would stimulate thousands of slaves to flock to his side. His army would then link up with Frederick Douglass’ to burn “the Slavocracy” into “a smoldering pile of char!”
As history, not fiction, Banks’ novel is exceedingly relevant today because Brown’s vision is reminiscent of the logic behind Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City — the sight of a federal building in rubble was supposed to rally the militia around the country to rise and overthrow Washington. This might have actually happened had McVeigh let God do the planning. The Lord was ostensibly the one responsible for John Brown’s acts of righteous terrorism, including his murderous rampage against pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1855. Brown possessed that primal 19th century American trait that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young shared: personal communication with God.
Deep in “Cloudsplitter,” Banks has one of the Brown sons shout: “Shut up, Henry! You have to do what Father says. He has spoken with the Lord all these years, and you haven’t.” But we all know such communication can fog a father’s brain with ego and madness. Later, Owen himself reports, “I looked into Father’s ice-gray eyes and saw a strange sort of puzzlement there, and for the first time realized that he … did not in the slightest understand me. He did not know who I was … Suddenly, I felt pity for the Old Man. Despite his intelligence and gifts of language and his mastery of stratagem, he possessed a rare and dangerous kind of stupidity — a stupidity of the heart.”
These two bits — one intentionally or unintentionally hilarious, and the other sad, incisive and tragically beautiful — clarify that Banks’ book is not really a 751-page novel about Harpers Ferry — that carnage occurs only in the novel’s end. And as massive as the novel’s historical scope is, “Cloudsplitter” is finally a 751-page novel about a dysfunctional family.
Great American Novels can be about such things. God knows, American history is composed of nothing but dysfunctional families. Banks has reported that his own father was a drunk who beat Russell’s mom and the kids, then abandoned the family when the author was just 12. Banks is 57 now. His character Owen Brown is even older — an old emotional failure in psychic exile in California, raising sheep and still obsessed with his hallowed father. Although Owen’s observations about American society in the 1850s are insightful and wise, his take on his own father is strangely immature. It’s as if Owen is the one whose father abandoned his family when he was only 12 and the guy just never got over it.
Reading a 12-year-old’s rant about Father gets a little tiring after a few hundred pages. Banks’ seemingly on-again, off-again period vocabulary gets tiring too. Banks says he limited the words in this novel to ones appearing in the 1853 edition of Webster’s dictionary and the Bible, but history can’t excuse his constant wooden reworking of Herman Melville’s, Emily Dickinson’s and Moses’ tongue. A reader wades through paragraph after paragraph that slog on like this: “As first, the slope was a gentle incline, and Father and I were able to hold the wagon off the horses by tying the driver’s brake back and pausing uphill against the box from the front, our feet skidding and slipping clumsily in the snow. But soon the descent quickened, and the wagon started to break loose. I grabbed the spruce pole out of the wagon box and slung it across to Father, and we each raced to a tree beside the trail and lashed the rope around it, locking the wheels. Then we let the lines out slowly and inched the wagon down the rough trail, skidding it like a sledge, until the ropes had run early all the way out, when we each tied the end to the tree and scrambled down to the wagon and choked the wheels with rocks. Then we stumbled back uphill to the tree, untied the slack ropes, and walked them forward a ways, where we wound them around a nearer pair of trees.”
This is not bad prose. It’s just workman-like. Cormac McCarthy’s recent novels are full of similar descriptions, except McCarthy writes nothing but
declarative sentences, using commas as sparingly as the Roman legionnaires used nails at crucifixions. Rather then trudge on like Banks’ prose, McCarthy’s goes through a transformation similar to how the weight of the world can turn coal into diamonds.
At a recent panel, held at yet another Barnes & Noble store, to discuss the launching of HarperFlamingo, Banks was seated next to novelist Armistead Maupin. After the latter described adding a two-syllable word to the end of a paragraph not for meaning, but for rhythm, Banks shot Maupin a look of unbridled disgust as if it was unseemly to monkey with content that way. Yet there was a time when Banks would have put his arm around Maupin’s shoulder as a brother. That’s because Banks himself actively worshipped at the alter of lyric prose. Banks’ beautiful 1985 novel, “Continental Drift,” is perhaps the Great American Lyrical Novel of this century.
In that book a man is stabbed and falls into the water “like a pale blossom in a storm of blossoms, filling the air with white, a delicate, slowly shifting drift through moonlight to the ground.” In “Cloudsplitter,” slaveholders are not murdered lyrically, but with Dashiell Hammett flatness: “Fred and then Henry Thompson and Salmon joined in and began hacking away at the brothers, chopping them apart at the arms and slashing them in their chest and bellies, and even Oliver got in some blows with his sword.”
Banks’ numerous death scenes are powerful, but you’d think the author would have been tempted to write at least one Robert Stone-ish hallucinatory language bit, sentences that would get a reader inside the young killers’ state of homicidal rectitude. But Banks gets visionary only once, when Brown and Owen witness the long-distance death of son/brother Fred. “I saw an extraordinary thing. It’s something that occurs rarely, but nonetheless normally, at sea or on the desert, and also, on the rarest of occasions, happens out of the prairies of the West, where it appears in more nearly perfect detail and on a much grander scale.” Owen reports that this event is “commonly called a mirage.” What happens is that “objects and entire scenes and events located far beyond one’s normal range of vision are brought close and are made sharply, silently visible.”
Banks spends an entire page describing this phenomenon in order to justify how Owen, who is “miles” from the scene, can view Fred’s death. Oh Russell, none of your readers would have jumped up and accused you of being Gabriel Garcma Marquez if you just had Owen describe what happened without dragging a mirage into the picture!
“I write the kind of book I want to read,” Banks recently said. “My greatest fear is not that my reader is going to be bored, but that I am going to be bored.” That’s fine. But what is tragically missing from his Great American Novel (tragic because Banks’ aspirations are glorious in these post-memoir days) and why, sadly, “Cloudsplitter” is not a great Great American Novel, is that Banks made no attempt to accomplish Huneker’s mysterious “big bow-wow strain” — that undeniable sense of pizzazz that lifts a narration from mere realism into American realism — a realism that is far crazier, extravagant and otherworldly (just read the newspapers!) than the so-called “magic realism” practiced by all those false gods in Latin America. Doctorow knows this. Styron knows this. Even DeLillo knows this — which is why that former postmodernist’s “Underworld” is more realistic and American than Russell’s history-to-the-letter “Cloudsplitter.”
This review is expressing a minority opinion. Most of the Big Guns have uniformly praised the novel, although everyone’s praise is strangely muted. For example, neither Walter Kirn (New York Times Book Review) nor Gail Caldwell (Boston Globe) announced that they were doing cartwheels over the book. Indeed, all of the Big Guns seem to be secretly telegraphing: “Here is another worthy fat book you can buy and sit on a bookshelf unread beside ‘Mason & Dixon’ and ‘Underworld.’”
No one admits this, but ask any clerk at Barnes & Noble. They’ll tell you how there are thousands of unread copies of those last two titles sitting in home libraries across the hinterlands. Maybe you yourself know a reader who cracked a copy and never finished it. Well, that reader will never finish “Cloudsplitter” for a reason that’s much different than the Pynchon or DeLillo tomes. It’s not a cartoon, like “Mason & Dixon.” It is not an alternate history of the abolitionist movement, describing a non-existent Harriet Beecher Stowe novel the way “Underworld” features a phantom Sergei Eisenstein flick. The Banks novel is, in fact, a relentlessly coherent narration. But it will remain unread because Banks has ignored what all American writers should know: In the end you can, in fact, bore yourself. Go ahead and bore yourself silly. Just don’t bore the great American reader.
James Dickey died this year. So did Allen Ginsberg, who got off the best line about “Deliverance,” Dickey’s lone bestseller (“What James Dickey doesn’t realize,” Ginsberg mused, “is that being fucked in the ass isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you in American life”). Isaiah Berlin died. So did Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Michael Dorris, J. Anthony Lukas, James Michener, V.S. Pritchett and Murray Kempton.
Call me morbid, but it seems appropriate to commence this piece with a list of 1997′s illustrious dead — a roll call of literary souls worth mourning. (In death, even Michener took on Texas-sized stature when the extent of his philanthropy was revealed.) Why? Because if on one level 1997 was the best year in recent memory to be an alert, yea-saying reader — for an abundance of reasons I’ll be getting to — it was also a year in which there were some seismic, queasy-making shifts in the lit world. Some of the old niceties began slipping away (some of them deservedly), a postwar generation of writers started to stumble, and a cold and crackling new economic order swept in under the doorjamb.
Civility, for sure, suffered a few head wounds in 1997. At a panel discussion at the New York Public Library in October, Barnes & Noble CEO Leonard Riggio gave novelist Cynthia Ozick a start when he outed her sales figures, revealing that his continent-girdling chain had sold but a few hundred copies of her Holocaust masterpiece “The Shawl.” In response, Ozick politely murmured something about how she’d like to sell more books — but so would Stephen King. The evening’s topic: “Book Publishing: Dead or Alive?” People left wondering.
Revenge had a bullish year. New novels from such celebrated old goats as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were accompanied by frisky tell-all memoirs dictated by aggrieved former lovers. (Behind every great male novelist, it sometimes seemed, there was an extremely pissed-off woman.) Retaliation came into its own as a genre, and these novelists suffered some very ’90s-style indignities. The high-low point in Adele Mailer’s “The Last Party” — which is arguably better-written, and surely less pretentious, than Mailer’s own “The Gospel According to the Son” — may be when young Norman catches Adele in bed with another man (she was avenging his own cheating ways), strides into the room and stubs out a lit cigarette into the man’s naked buttocks. The low-low point is, of course, when Mailer stabs her. In “Handsome Is,” a memoir from Bellow’s former literary agent, Harriet Wasserman, we hear not only about the great writer’s abiding narcissism, but Wasserman also mentions that she would rather lick out a Times Square toilet bowl than say hello to Bellow’s new agent, Andrew Wylie. And in Claire Bloom’s “Leaving a Doll’s House” (a late 1996 title), we learn about her 18 years with Philip Roth — including news that, during their divorce proceedings, Roth charged her $150 an hour for having helped her go over her scripts.
Not all of the year’s aggrieved memoirists charged at writers: Mia Farrow dumped on Woody Allen in her mopey, elegiac “What Falls Away”; Kelly Flinn dumped on the Air Force in “Proud to Be”; and Paula Barbieri unwittingly dumped on herself in “The Other Woman: My Years with O.J.”
Those Mailer, Bellow and Roth novels were kept company by new books from John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. Readers could be forgiven, in a retro-hellish year, for walking into bookstores and thinking it was 1973 all over again. (Even J.D. Salinger poked his squirrely nostrils out from his hole for a moment, sniffed the wind and apparently decided not to release his story “Hapworth 16, 1924″ as a novel. Next year he’ll get — what else? — depicted in another tell-all memoir, from his former teen lover, Joyce Maynard.) New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has long ridden herd over this flock, caning the beasties who got too randy. Few were surprised when she bestowed her blessings on Roth’s relatively soft-focus “American Pastoral” while pounding Updike’s sharply lecherous “Toward the End of Time.” At times, however, a few of these aging writers seemed to be caning themselves. I read most of these books, and if you forced me into Entertainment Weekly’s bullpen I would grade them thusly: Mailer: D; Bellow: B-; Roth: B; Updike: A-; Vonnegut: B-. (The Pynchon I couldn’t get through, although unlike Slate’s estimable critic, Walter Kirn, that fact did prevent me from reviewing it.)
Those tell-all memoirs aside, the book world in 1997 did occasionally feel like a tug-of-war between the sexes. Oprah Winfrey solidified her clout, sending a number of titles (Mary McGarry Morris’ “Songs in Ordinary Time,” Earnest Gaines’ “A Lesson Before Dying,” two novels by Kaye Gibbons) soaring onto bestseller lists and onto the counter of your local Starbucks. So pervasive was Oprah’s influence that the New York Times published a long, fretful piece about the potential “feminization” of literature. Because so many of Oprah’s viewers (and so many fiction buyers) are women, the Times reasoned, publishers might start to skew their lists toward books that are by and about women.
Sounds plausible — until you take into account one of the year’s other significant publishing trends, the rise of manly-men-against-the-elements narratives. Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” and Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” both lingered on bestseller lists for months, and they seemed to provide a cultural antidote to wispy, so-introspective-it-hurts memoirs like Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss” (alternate title: “Hop on Pop”), a book about her long-running adult affair with her father. Harrison’s book was published in February, and the reaction to it was loopily fascinating. “The Kiss” prompted dozens of furrowed-brow panels on “The Rise of Memoir,” a brutal review by James Wolcott in the New Republic (Wolcott accused Harrison of, among other things, being a lousy mother by not waiting to publish her tome) and prompted Harvard child psychotherapist Robert Coles — in what must be a first — to withdraw his jacket blurb for the book.
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The memoir glut showed no signs of slowing down (among the year’s best were J.M. Coetzee’s “Scenes From a Provincial Life,” James Salter’s “Burning the Days,” Thomas Lynch’s “The Undertaking” and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”), but memoir as a cultural obsession and weekly Charlie Rose topic seems over, played out, kaput.
Other writers popped up in new and often surprising formats. Tom Wolfe released a discarded chunk of his new novel, “Chocolate City,” which is due next year, on audiotape only. Titled “Ambush at Fort Bragg” and read by actor and fellow Yalie Edward Norton, it was a brisk and dazzling slice of media criticism and surely the best fiction that came out of my (rental) car stereo this year. Updike popped up on Amazon.com, delivering the first and last sentences of a collaborative murder mystery, co-written with Amazon customers. Updike’s Kakutani-friendly opener: “Miss Tasso Polk at ten-ten alighted from the elevator onto the olive tiles of the nineteenth floor only lightly nagged by a sense of something wrong.” Amazon had a hit on its hands.
Stephen King’s silkiest move this year happened off the page. King fled Viking, his longtime publisher, and set out after someone willing to pay him a Jim Carrey-esque $17 million advance for each of his next three books. He wound up at Simon & Schuster with a deal that many in the publishing world will be watching closely — it guarantees him a $2 million advance per book and an unprecedented 50 percent share of the profits. Perhaps he’d been perusing Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Comeback.”
The King deal, with its repercussions, is merely one more reason for publishers to fret. Book sales have been off by as much as 5 percent for each of the last several years, and some began to panic this year. In June, shortly after posting a $7 million loss for the quarter, HarperCollins shocked many observers (and certainly some of its writers) when it tried to staunch the flow of red ink by abruptly canceling more than 100 titles.
Spookier still was the news that many publishers have begun to turn to book chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders (which is among Salon’s sponsors) for advice about what books to publish and how. The New York Times noted that Grove Press abandoned plans to publish a memoir titled “Love Potion No. 9″ by songwriter Jerry Leiber after Barnes & Noble responded coolly to it and ordered a mere 1,200 copies. Similarly, when Random House was unhappy with the dust jacket for Mario Puzo’s “The Last Don,” it turned to a Barnes & Noble buyer for advice. (The cover changed from black to crimson, and was stamped with more eye-grabbing typography.)
The splashiest behind-the-scenes news this fall was Harold Evans’ departure from Random House after seven years as the publishing house’s scene-making president and publisher. Did Harry jump or was he pushed? Most seemed to agree it was a mixture of both. At the time of Evans’ exit, Random House was in a slump — out of the 30 titles on the New York Times bestseller list that week, only three were RH titles: John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” Arundhati Roy’s surprise-bestseller “The God of Small Things” and a book by Monty Roberts called “The Man Who Listens to Horses.” Worse for Evans was the fact that, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out, each of those titles was acquired by editor in chief Ann Godoff, Evans’ replacement.
Evans’ departure may mean the end of the Big Dick management style, at least at Random House. Evans liked Big Books by Big Names, and he threw for them the kind of parties that regularly landed him (along with his wife, New Yorker editor Tina Brown) in Page Six and other gossip columns. Among his successes were Colin Powell’s “My American Journey” and Anonymous/Joe Klein’s “Primary Colors.” Among his notable miscues were the $5 million he paid to Marlon Brando for an autobiography that tanked and $2.5 million to ex-Clinton advisor and foot-fetishizer Dick Morris. (Cynthia Ozick can take solace in the fact that Evans once admitted, famously, that the 29 Random House books that made the New York Times “notable books” of 1993 list collectively lost $600,000.)
Evans grooved on (self-spun) controversy, and 1997 had its fair share of it. Esquire’s literary editor, Will Blythe, quit in protest after then-editor Ed Kosner killed a David Leavitt short story because advertisers objected to its homosexual content. Romance novelist Janet Dailey admitted that three of her books included passages plagiarized from competitor Nora Roberts, the romance industry’s hottest writer (no wonder you thought all that stuff sounded the same). And Salman Rushdie and John le Carri pounded the crud out of each other in the letters section of London’s Guardian newspaper. (Rushdie to le Carri: “illiterate, pompous ass.” Le Carri to Rushdie: “self-canonizing, arrogant colonialist.”)
The Rushdie-le Carri feud started when le Carri published a Guardian piece in which he defended himself against allegations that his most recent novel, “The Tailor of Panama,” was anti-Semitic. The essay enraged Rushdie, who dashed off a letter saying he’d be more sympathetic to le Carri if “he had not been so ready to join an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer.” According to Rushdie, when he became the subject of an Iranian fatwa, or death order, in 1989, le Carri “eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants. It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now.”
The letters went ping-ponging back and forth for a week or so, giving U.K. newspaper editors a respite from the post-Diana doldrums. Le Carri responded: “Rushdie’s way with the truth is as self-serving as ever. I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming Rushdie to be a shining innocent. My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says that great religions may be insulted with impunity.” Rushdie got off what sounded like the last word: “Every time he opens his mouth, he digs himself into a deeper hole.”
This year, like every year, there were books by well-regarded writers that didn’t seem up to their usual standards, either critically or commercially. Among them in 1997: E. Annie Proulx’s “Accordion Crimes,” Paul Auster’s “Hand to Mouth,” Allan Gurganus’ “Plays Well With Others” and Carol Shield’s “Larry’s Party.” But they seemed like aberrations.
In general, 1997 offered myriad reasons to believe. Fine first novels by Charles Frazier (“Cold Mountain”) and Arundhati Roy (“The God of Small Things”) won the National Book Award and Booker Prize, respectively. Among the other writers who made impressive debuts were Arthur Golden (“Memoirs of a Geisha”), Alex Garland (“The Beach”), Kirsten Bakis (“The Lives of the Monster Dogs”) and Steve Lattimore (“Circumnavigations”).
A slew of old favorites returned with work that ranked with their best. Those books included Robert Stone’s “Bear and His Daughter,” Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” Diane Johnson’s “Le Divorce,” Edna O’Brien’s “Down By the River,” John Banville’s “The Untouchable,” Muriel Spark’s “Reality and Dreams” and Richard Russo’s “Straight Man.” And happily, small presses seemed stronger than ever: If you missed Ellen Ullman’s “Close to the Machine” (City Lights), Eileen Whitfield’s “Pickford,” David Haynes’ “All-American Dream Dolls” (Milkweed) or Barbara Gowdy’s “Mister Sandman” (Steerforth), to name just three, it’s not too late to pick them up for Christmas.
when Alex485 — his e-mail moniker, not his real name — decided to set up a Web site devoted to his all-time favorite novel, Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” he found that he had one potential bummer on his hands: He couldn’t find any photographs of the diminutive Mississippi-born writer. Alex didn’t let this problem ruin his day. “Since I’m having trouble finding Donna-images,” he confesses on his The Secret History Fansite, “I’m using jpegs of (actress) Moira Kelly instead. I look at it this way: if there’s ever a biopic or something of the sort, I think Moira Kelly should play the part.”
Welcome to the cheeky world of author-worshipping Web sites. There are hundreds of electronic shrines like Alex’s out there, beaming out information about — and sending squiggly love rays toward — writers from Samuel Johnson to Danielle Steel. A few of these sites, like Steel’s and Sue Grafton’s, are commercial endeavors set up by publishing houses. A few others, like Margaret Atwood’s impressive site, are established by the authors themselves. (Atwood uses her Web site as an extension of her office: She reprints the comic poem she sends when declining invitations to provide blurbs, and an essay called The Road to Publication that provides advice to would-be writers.)
Most of these sites, though, are more like Alex’s. They’re tossed onto the Web by fans, zealous grad students and low-level academics, and they combine serious scholarship (bibliographies, concordances, links to interviews and unpublished work) with a heaping side-order of giddy ephemera, copyright issues be damned. Want to see a photograph of Martin Amis shooting pool in Chicago? Try the Amis site set up by an English professor at Michigan’s Albion College. How about a shirtless Hunter S. Thompson tossing a football, Y.A. Tittle-style, with what looks like a blood-sucking leech over his right nipple? Try this Thompson site, among several. Or maybe you’d like to see Harry Crews looking like he’s just downed a bad batch of Slim Jims. Try the Crews site set up by a Florida native with the unlikely name of Damon Sauve.
Pets are popular on these sites, too. Where else are you going to find a photo of Umberto Eco pointing out some bird droppings to his sister’s dog, Best? Or an image of Danielle Steel’s potbellied pig, Coco?
I recently spent a few days on Yahoo, surfing around these stray writerly sites to see what I’d pull up. The results surprised — and often delighted — me. The best of these sites are so comprehensive that, before long, they’ll easily reach a level of scholarly utility that will rival that of some small college libraries. Even better, because these Web sites are so wildly idiosyncratic, they’re almost always fun to poke around in.
Take the Joyce Carol Oates home page, Celestial Timepiece. You’ve got to boogie to keep up with the hyper-prolific Oates, and this site is up to the task. (This site’s “recent additions” page alone has nearly 100 links.) Celestial Timepiece prints the first chapters, and the jacket copy, from nearly all of Oates’ books, as well as information on everything from the film adaptations of her work to lists of the awards she’s won. Full text is provided for many of her short stories and essays. My favorite part of this site, though, is the page of book jacket portraits that spans Oates’ career. You can watch her metamorphose from a young Audrey Hepburn-like gamin into … well, Joyce Carol Oates, a woman who resembles the MTV cartoon character Daria’s much older sister.
Sites for Don DeLillo and Crews are almost as comprehensive, and offer different kinds of goodies — including a selection of the blurbs these two have given other writer’s books. Some of these are odder than others. “This novel hangs in the memory like a fishhook,” reads one of Crews’ blurbs, for Barry Hannah’s 1980 novel “Ray.” (Ouch.) The DeLillo blurb page features the reclusive novelist describing Frank Lentricchia’s 1996 book “Johnny Critelli and the Knifemen” as resembling “a series of frescoes embellished with body juices and food stains.” (Ick.) In the spirit of free exchange, the DeLillo site also offers a sampling of opinion from the author’s detractors, including George Will’s review of “Libra,” in which he scorns the book as nothing less than “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.”
Some of my other favorite sites, each of which contains mountains of scholarly detail, are those for Amis, Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon. On The Cormac McCarthy Home Page, “the official Web site of the Cormac McCarthy Society,” you can browse through an ongoing scholarly debate among a testy group called The Fighting Cormackians or add your own two cents in a discussion area called Cormac Chat! Feel like joining the McCarthy Society? According to a note on the application page, if you mail your $35 check right now, you “will receive (while supplies last) a free commemorative edition (published for the first McCarthy Conference) of John Sepich’s “Notes on Blood Meridian.” Sign me up!
On the San Narciso Community College Thomas Pynchon Home Page, there’s a tidy summary of the known facts about the author’s life, and a fairly groovy Pynchon Discography of LPs that have “received the nod” in Pynchon’s work. On The Martin Amis Page, the great links include one to Amis’ scalding review, from the Times of London, of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent book, “It Takes a Village.”
While you’re clicking your way through even the most professional of these sites, you’re always aware that it’s not Alfred Kazin who is guiding you along. In fact, there’s a real poignancy to some of these sites, because the person (or persons) behind them can’t resist popping out from behind the curtain to say, “Here I am!” A visitor to The Philip Roth Research Homepage, for example, will find a serious archive of information about the writer’s career. But that visitor will also find a link to a personal page maintained by the page’s creator, a grad student at Purdue named Derek Royal. On Derek Royal’s Home Page you’ll find links to photos such as Derek and his wife on their first picnic and Derek with his favorite Christmas gift, something he calls a “Yard o’ Beef.” Never mind the link he provides to the Captain James T. Kirk Sing-a-Long Page.
On The Centaurian, a John Updike page maintained by James Yerkes, a professor of Religion and Philosophy at Pennsylvania’s Moravian College, a recent update included a bulletin about Yerkes’ own personal tragedy. “SLOW POKE! BROKEN FINGER TO RIGHT HAND!” Yerkes exclaims. “This week I was defending my Dalmatian from an attack by a Pit Bulldog on the beach in Provincetown, and fractured my finger quite badly. Surgery tomorrow, so there will be delays in entries for a few days. Hunt and peck by the left hand goes slowly, of course. But the page will go on! Keep writing, yes!”
Some sites are even more confessional. Melinda Jackson, a University of Texas grad student, maintains a site called Alice Walker — Womanist Writer on which she intones that Walker “inspired me as I struggled to become a vegetarian; she helped me define my sexuality and womanism.” And a computer software expert named John Walkenbach, the man behind the Nicholson Baker Fan Page, implies that he erected his site because he felt sorry for Baker. “I checked the major … search engines and did not find a Web site devoted to his work,” Walkenbach writes. “So I created this one — an admittedly modest effort, but it’s better than nothing.” (At another point Walkenbach confesses: “I don’t know much about Nicholson Baker. In fact, my primary source of information comes from book jackets.”) Give Walkenbach some credit, though. He digs up a few genuine oddities, including a link to a screed that’s purported to be one of Baker’s postings to a newsgroup about the mutilation of library books, and a link to a Suzanne Vega message board that discusses the mention of a Vega song in Baker’s last novel, “The Fermata.”
Does every writer get the Web site he or she deserves? Not exactly. But a better question might be: Is having a half-assed Web site devoted to your work better than none at all? You’ll have to ask Norman Mailer, A.S. Byatt, John McPhee, Gloria Steinem, Jackie Collins, Graham Greene, Rick Moody, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney, Terry McMillan, Iris Murdoch, Paul Theroux, Lorrie Moore, Jayne Anne Phillips, Erica Jong, Harold Robbins, A.M. Homes and E. Annie Proulx — just a few of the writers whose names (in my searches, anyway) turned up nothing at all.
the all-American lost poet Delmore Schwartz — best remembered for the proverb “even paranoids have real enemies” — also deserves credit for the Caffeine Theory of the Enlightenment. By this account, the Age of Reason owed its brilliance, energy and encyclopedic ambition to the arrival, in Europe, of the java bean. Schwartz meant it as a joke. Yet cultural historians have spent many happy years researching the economic, social, literary and political (if not gastrointestinal) consequences of the coffeehouse for the rising bourgeoisie. And the example of Voltaire — who sucked down a few dozen cups a day whenever possible — has long seemed to me to clinch the case.
But the most eloquent statement of the Caffeine Theory, as adapted to American circumstances, appears about halfway into Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon.” The year is 1761. Charles Mason (an astronomer) and Jeremiah Dixon (a surveyor) have reached Philadelphia, sent by the Royal Society in London to establish the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania. They have yet to put together a work team for the job. And their first trip to an American coffee shop reveals a murky den of iniquity: a “Combination, peculiar and precise, of unceasing Talk and low Visibility, that makes Riot’s indoor sister, Conspiracy, not only possible, but resultful as well.” Infusions of “the Invigorating liquid” and New World rowdiness give the place a decidedly revolutionary atmosphere: “An individual in expensive attire, impersonating a gentleman, stands upon a table freely urging sodomitical offenses against the body of the Sovereign, being cheered on by a circle of Mechanics, who are not reluctant with their own suggestions.”
Besides coffee, these Yankees wolf down sugary pastries and puff away on tobacco. (A few pages earlier, Mason and Dixon have sampled a little of George Washington’s hemp crop.) The narrator wonders, “May unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the same time, a habit without historical precedent, upon these shores be creating a new sort of European? less respectful of the forms that have previously held Society together, more apt to speak his mind, or hers, upon any topic he chooses, and to defend his position as violently as need be?”
Let’s see now. Fervent consumption of mood-altering substances … a certain reckless vigor in the expression of opinion … pothead humor … It all sounds rather like the ’60s of more recent memory. And that (as old-timey Communists used to say, and militia folk still do) is no accident!
But more paranoia later. The crossroads where serious literature and conspiracy theory meet is not that busy. Potential readers — most of them, anyway — will reach “Mason & Dixon” along the High Culture thoroughfare. All the standard Pynchonian elements are in place — most conspicuously, of course, the erudition, which is casual yet abundant. “The Crying of Lot 49″ incorporated thermodynamics, Jacobean revenge plays and the evolution of the postal system. “Gravity’s Rainbow” drew from behaviorism, rocket science and German history. With “Mason & Dixon,” a nodding acquaintance with British and American history of the period is taken for granted; and it does not hurt to have a look at Dava Sobel’s recent bestseller, “Longitude,” unless you have acquired some knowledge of 18th century astronomical and navigational problems through alternate means.
Other familiar qualities carry over from Pynchon’s earlier work. There are references (direct and indirect) to his past novels — and, as always, funny character names. The narrator, for instance, is the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke. Pynchon once dreamed of writing musicals, and his characters sometimes burst into poetry and song — all of it deliberately awful, usually to humorous effect. Sometimes, though, it merits only a groan.
And then there is the prose. For nearly 800 pages, Pynchon mimics the rhythms, punctuation and spelling of the 18th century — with those irregular, tho’ colorful, Bursts of Capitalization and Italics, govern’d by one knows not what internal logic, save it be that of the Author’s peculiar Humor. Every review of the novel in the continental United States, Hawaii and Guam will compare it to John Barth’s “The Sot-Weed Factor,” and some resemblance is certainly there. But in “Mason & Dixon,” the pastiche is livelier and shows a better ear. In the life and opinions of the Reverend Cherrycoke, Pynchon has created a narrative voice that shifts between various styles of prose (novelistic, philosophical, psychotic) — and unites the comic and the pathetic. Pynchon somehow borrows from Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” without sounding anything like it. That is more difficult than it might sound.
From his earliest work, Pynchon has focused on that state of heightened and modified attention called paranoia. And I do mean earliest. In a piece of fiction from his high school newspaper, he has a character mentioning “a fascinating experiment in psychology entailing the instilling of paranoid hallucinations into the logical mind by psychoanalytic deletion of the superego.” And so today — with the benefit of keen hindsight — it seems inevitable that he would set a novel in colonial America during the 1760s. After all, the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence were a period of intense conspiracy theorizing. Countless pamphlets and sermons denounced the nefarious intentions of both the king and the pope, and their various minions. George Washington himself believed in a “regular, systematic plan” by which the British intended to reduce the colonists to slaves “as tame and abject … as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” Anxiety has deep roots in our history; it finds plenty to nourish it there.
So the mid-18th century colonies offer Pynchon a perfect stage for cabals to skulk upon. “Mason & Dixon” arrives with the requisite number of grand, sinister plots. There are schemes involving — among others — the Freemasons, Sweden, France, the Dutch East India Company, calendar reform and a very long-term Jesuit maneuver to take over China. (Diagraming how the conspiracies all link up is a task best left to Lyndon LaRouche’s staff.) Cherrycoke’s impressions of the New World Order have their echoes in the land today, but the familiar paradoxes of paranoia are not so overtly the focus of Pynchon’s own interest, now, it seems to me. He gives Cherrycoke other things to think about.
What has taken its place, then? Mysticism, for one thing. And melancholia as well. In Pynchon’s hands, the surveying expedition becomes the model of a rational, scientifically-minded Enlightenment trying to re-create the world in its image. Mason and Dixon use precise instruments and calculations to determine where a perfectly straight line should be. Yet their progress — moving east to west, slowly, for several years — cuts through scenes of Old World occultism (golems!) and New World religious enthusiasm. Backwoods surrealism is not the only dominant note, though. Extermination of the Indians is off to a gradual but promising start. And the line divides (or, conversely, joins) a slave state and a free state. The coffeehouse libertarians do not trouble themselves too much about such things.
As Mason and Dixon finish their work, they realize that the line itself is evil. “To mark a right Line upon the Earth,” explains their companion, Captain Zhang, master of feng shui, “is to inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live here the year ’round to see as other than hateful Assault. How can it pass unanswer’d?” Or perhaps the line’s effects simply confirm “the melancholy suggestion, that the ‘new’ Continent Europeans found, had been long attended, from its own ancient Days, by murder, slavery, and the poor fragments of a Magic irreparably broken.” All of which must sound unbearably gloomy. Not at all. “Mason & Dixon” is, by turns, demanding, silly and profound. And, at times, just plain weird. (There is, for example, an involved subplot involving an amorous mechanical duck that undoubtedly owes something to the “unchecked consumption of … modern substances.”) Pynchon’s reputation as a fearsomely abstruse and difficult writer is secure, as long as the larger reading public never finds out how funny and moving he can be. After finishing “Mason & Dixon,” I am ready to turn back to page 1, to read anew Pynchon’s map of “this Country cryptick and perilous.”
